Wooded Landscape with a Screen of Trees Sheltering a Cottage

Among Rousseauʼs collection of seventeenth-century Dutch prints was a stellar impression of Rembrandtʼs "The Three Trees," an etching well known and often copied in France. It provided the inspiration for this composition with a similarly strong foreground. Rousseau experimented with Rembrandtʼs practice of placing a dark form against a bright clear sky but tempered the silhouette by playing with the fall of light on the treetops and by adding hints of color. The inscription at lower left suggests that this scene depicts Rocher Saint-Germain, a boulder field in the forest of Fontainebleau.